Which didn’t bother me, because I wasn’t hungry in the slightest.
That night, after everyone had gone to bed, I snuck downstairs and risked my dad’s phone bill review by calling Natalia. Unfortunately, her cell phone had been canceled. The next morning, after Dad went to work, I asked Kerry if I could call my friend. “Sure you can,” she said. “I know how it is.”
Of course, they didn’t have so much as a cordless phone. My only chance at privacy was their bedroom, while Kerry played downstairs with the kids. “Hello, Mrs. Miksa,” I said, when Natalia’s mother answered.
“Seed-ney, dahling! How is the farm?”
Several niceties later, Natalia came on the line and I told her about my father’s plan.
“Oh my God,” Natalia said. “We have to come up with something. I’m going to find a way to get my mom’s car. I’ll come out and get you, and take you to a clinic. Then we can spend a night in a hotel somewhere. They’ll know we ran away, but they never need to know why.”
I twisted the phone cord around my finger. If we ran away, there was no way I’d be allowed to go on the canoe trip. I told Natalia this.
“Fuck the canoe trip,” Natalia said. “You need to get that baby out of your body.”
“Shhh,” I hissed, not knowing whether her parents could hear her. “And don’t call it a baby.”
“A baby is exactly what it’s going to be if you don’t do something very soon.”
“That’s not true,” I said. The way I figured, I had plenty of time. Postponing my abortion four weeks—even, worst-case scenario, seven weeks—should not be a problem. “I’ve got till, like, twelve weeks,” I told Natalia.
“You’re crazy.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I don’t have any money.”
Natalia paused. Through her parents, she had regular access to small amounts of cash, but nothing like what we’d need for the abortion. “Maybe I could take something from around here,” she offered. “Steve could sell it for us. There are so many knickknacks, they’d never miss one or two.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe we can plan that for when I get home. The beginning of August, when I get back from Canada, you can come get me and I’ll have the abortion.”
“That would give me more time to collect money,” Natalia said. “I can just keep putting cash aside, and maybe sneak some from their wallets here and there. I should be able to save a few hundred in a month.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then it’s all set.”
“Another idea,” she said, “is that I could come on the trip with you.”
I hated this immediately, which surprised me. Usually distance from Natalia made me feel lost and panicked. But if she came along on the trip, I would have to talk about being pregnant every day. I realized that one of the things I’d really been looking forward to was just not thinking about it for a while.
“If you come on the trip,” I said, “how would you get the money?”
“I’ll think of some way.”
“Your parents would never let you come.”
“Maybe not,” Natalia said, instead of arguing. I could tell she felt a little hurt that I hadn’t jumped at the thought of her coming along. “Do you feel all right?” she asked. “Do you feel sick?”
“Not a bit,” I said, which was true. I felt light and airy, as if the pregnancy had already been terminated. “I’m just fine.”
“Sometimes I worry,” she said, “that you’re going to turn into one of those girls who pretends she isn’t pregnant and then throws the baby into a Dumpster.”
A cool summer breeze drifted in the window, making the fish mobile over Rebecca’s crib sway and circle. Her tiny patchwork quilt was tangled around the worn, eyeless bunny that Aaron used to chew on constantly. He’d called it the Love Bunny.
“I would never do something like that,” I told Natalia.
We spoke for a few minutes more. I told her I’d try to call again before I left next week, but that I couldn’t make any promises. It was only after we’d hung up that I realized I’d forgotten to ask about Switzerland, or if she’d had a chance to rendezvous with Steve.
I walked downstairs to see Kerry and the kids. She was sitting on the floor stacking wooden blocks with the twins. Rebecca sat in her lap, chewing on a splintery red triangle.
“How’d that go?” Kerry asked.
“Fine,” I said, and she smiled.
“Do you ever think about using disposable diapers when Dad’s not around?” I asked, thinking about how Kerry loved to be sneaky, and how she still loved being on the receiving end of girlish gossip.
She sighed. “I sure do,” she said. “But I’ve never figured out a way to hide them. One goof would be all it took, and he’d hit the roof. I’d wind up canoeing with you in Canada.”
I laughed. “That might not be so bad.”
“That’s true,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Forget the mosquitoes and the rocky ground. It would be the first time I’d slept in three years.”
She pushed lank blond hair out of her blue eyes. Her pretty, plump face suddenly looked to me like it belonged to a rebel. When she and my dad met, she’d been a marathon runner and a vegan, as passionate about organic food as he was. Like Aaron and Ezra, Kerry was an identical twin, and her sister—who didn’t have children—still looked spare and athletic, a weird ghost-version of the woman Kerry used to be. Clearly Kerry’s new, fleshy body was a way of thumbing her nose at Dad and his impossible principles.
I could tell her right now, I thought. I moved my tongue around, testing the words inside closed lips. Kerry, I could say, I have something to tell you. I’m pregnant.
Maybe she would stand up then and there, brushing off the dust and flour that always clung to her clothes. She would go to some cookie jar, or underneath her mattress, and come back with the money I needed. We would drive together to the town called West Falls, and Kerry would sit in the waiting room with the three kids while I underwent the procedure. From inside the doctor’s office, I’d be able to hear their familiar whines and chatter. Kerry would check in on me in the recovery room and get all the directions from the nurse about taking care of me. Then she would help me to the car and drive me back to the farm. Maybe on the way we could pick up some soup that she could pretend she’d made herself. Sydney’s not feeling well, she would tell my father when he came home. I’m just going to heat up this soup for dinner and take her a bowl in her room. I would recover for a couple of days while Kerry secretly tended me, and then I would go off on my canoe trip without a care in the world, all my problems—or at least the worst of them—solved.
“Kerry,” I said. She looked up again, her eyes bright and expectant.
It was too big. I knew that if I told her, she would definitely get to her feet. But she would march directly to the phone and dial my father’s cell phone number, the one we were only supposed to use in case of emergency. Or worse, she would call my mother. The whole world would come crashing down on my head.
“I’m really looking forward to this trip,” I said, and she smiled.
chapter four
surprise, surprise
Mr. Campbell, the guy who ran the camp up in Canada, sent a list of things I needed to bring: no more than could fit into a single, midsize pack. My dad loaned me camping equipment, and my mother mailed a box with my passport and some warm clothes (Mr. Campbell’s letter warned that Canadian summer nights were chilly). Although I didn’t want to hear anything Mom had to say, it was a reflex to sift through the package and look for some kind of card.
When I didn’t find one, I automatically felt dejected and dissed. I thought that if I ever had a kid, I would punish her without being so emotional about it. The way my mother used anger to make points struck me as mean and even childish. It reminded me of the way Greg used to deal with me when I did something to hurt his feelings. He would freeze me out with these stony silences, attempting to make me feel worse and worse about what I’d done and who I was. My mothe
r did exactly the same thing. If she thought that would make me have any kind of sympathy for her, it just had the opposite effect. I had hardly any sympathy and almost no respect.
I decided to concentrate on getting ready for my trip. I jammed a warm sleeping bag, two bathing suits, three T-shirts, four pairs of socks, two pairs of shorts, a sweat suit, a pair of sneakers, a raincoat, a fleece jacket, a hat, and mittens into my dad’s external-frame pack. I would wear my jeans and hiking boots on the plane.
Kerry made a little packet of the toiletries I’d need. In the front pocket of the backpack, she zipped a bottle of Dr. Brauner’s peppermint soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, bug repellent (deet free at Dad’s insistence, despite Campbell’s recommendation), sunscreen, a Ziploc baggie full of Stri-Dex pads, and a box of o.b. tampons. That was the brand Mr. Campbell’s list recommended, because they didn’t have applicators. I watched Kerry tuck the box discreetly into its own separate compartment and thought how weirdly convenient it would be not to have to deal with my period on the trip.
The morning of my departure we woke at dawn. Dad drove me to the airport in Newark. We didn’t talk much on the drive, which took more than an hour. He listened to Morning Edition on NPR, shaking or nodding his head vehemently at any mention of global warming or the Middle East. There was one segment about public schools replacing sex education with abstinence-only programs. I watched Dad’s face for any sign of opinion, but he only hummed and looked out the window. Apparently this topic struck him as too frivolous to even listen to.
For the past few days, I had almost completely stopped worrying about my pregnancy. Maybe it was because I still couldn’t feel it in any kind of physical way. Every morning I stepped on the scale in Dad and Kerry’s bathroom, and I hadn’t gained an ounce. I’d even lost weight, despite Kerry’s buttery cooking. I thought about what my father had said about me being distant from my own body. But I didn’t feel distant from my body. I was a good athlete—not a great one, but competent enough to make the swim team and JV lacrosse. I tended to do best at individual sports, like diving or skiing. Although I had hated track the one term I’d joined the team, I liked to run. I felt aware of living inside my body, which had always done more or less what I wanted.
I had seen this kind of reasoning backfire in my friend Ashlyn, who was one of the best swimmers on our team. She always got chosen for national meets, and she was the one who always saved us when the rest of the team lagged behind. She also played field hockey and varsity lacrosse. Last year at an away meet for the swim team, Ashlyn and I shared a double bed at the New Haven Sheraton. We stayed up whispering long after the other girls had gone to sleep, and Ashlyn told me she’d been raped by this guy who lived in her old neighborhood. She told me that she should have seen it coming, because he used to follow her every day from the bus stop to her house.
“I never really worried about him,” Ashlyn told me, “because I always felt like I could take him. He wasn’t that much taller than me, and I knew I was so much stronger than the average girl. I worked out every day. I felt sure I could run faster than him if I ever needed to, and that I could fight him off. My body always did exactly what I told it. I thought I was invincible.”
She never told her parents that the guy was stalking her because she knew they would freak out. She thought she could handle it herself. The freedom she had, walking around on her own, still felt new; she didn’t want her dad to start escorting her like she was a little kid. But one night when Ashlyn got home late from lacrosse practice, the guy jumped out from behind a tree. He dragged her into the bushes of a house that had been for sale for months. Ashlyn was amazed by how much stronger he was. He pinned her fast underneath him, his body unmoving when she tried to push him off, his hand over her mouth stifling her screams.
Ashlyn’s family moved not long after this, and the boy never got in any kind of trouble. “I just never wanted to see his face again,” she told me.
I wondered if my confidence that this pregnancy would work itself out sprang from the same sort of delusion that had kept Ashlyn quiet. But even as I questioned that confidence, I couldn’t veer away from it. I’d read in Kerry’s pregnancy book that one in four women miscarried before the tenth week. Those odds did not seem so bad. Maybe I would be one of the lucky ones and lose the baby before I got back from Canada in August.
Because of my age, Dad was allowed to come with me to the gate. The first flight would take me to Toronto, where all the campers would meet, and we would fly on a chartered plane to a little town called North Bay. After that, a chartered bus would take us to Camp Bell on the shores of Lake Keewaytinook. If it had been my mother, she would have gone over the printed sheet of instructions—meeting place, passport, tickets—a thousand times. But my dad just handed it all to me, trusting that ten years of private education had left me capable of reading.
We got to the crowded gate and sat down to wait for the plane. As soon as I was settled, two soft, cold hands covered up my eyes.
“Guess who?” said the familiar, silky voice.
I circled my fingers around slim wrists and pulled the hands away. When I whirled around, there stood Natalia. She had the same gap-toothed smile, but she looked different somehow. She was pale, and I could tell she’d piled extra concealer under her eyes.
“Oh my God,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m coming with you!” said Natalia. “Can you believe it?”
I really couldn’t. For one thing, I’d never known Natalia to do anything remotely physical. After I’d quit the swim team I had to take gym class, and more days than not she would sit out with her period. Also, she had never been one to go without luxuries. I couldn’t imagine her without her iPod, let alone minus a bed or running water.
I studied Natalia’s face to make sure she was serious. She had on Lucky Brand jeans, a velvet T-shirt, and a cashmere shrug. I wondered if she’d packed mascara and glitter blush in her own lightweight backpack—which I could see, sitting over by Mr. Miksa, who waved at me, was top-of-the-line Kelty.
“Dad,” I said, “this is my friend Natalia.”
Dad stood up and shook her hand. I could see he was seething. “Mr. Biggs,” Natalia said, placing a second hand on top of his before he could pull away. “I’m so happy to finally meet you.”
Dad pulled his hand away and nodded, mumbling some-thing that sounded unconvincingly like “Great.” Then he said, “How exactly did this happen?”
“I told my mom what Sydney was doing, and she called Ms. Sincero right up to ask about it. She thought it sounded like the perfect thing for me. I’ve been in a little trouble myself of late.”
My father forgot civility altogether and frowned. If I were the sort of person to draw cartoons, my picture of this meeting would have used quite a bit of black ink for the huge cloud of smoke coming from his ears. No doubt my mother had poured herself a hefty glass of Chardonnay and had a good laugh imagining my father’s reaction to this development: a primary character from my usual life landing smack in the middle of his plan to separate me from all things familiar. At the same time, I recognized Natalia’s appearance as a nod from my mom toward me, maybe even a small bit of olive branch.
I introduced Dad to Mr. Miksa, who pinched my cheek and then pumped his hand enthusiastically. “Ve just love your little Seed-ney,” he said. “The girls will have a grand time in the woods, yes?”
The gate attendant announced the first boarding call, which included minors traveling alone. Natalia threw her arms around her father’s neck as Dad and I awkwardly kissed each other’s cheeks. Next thing I knew we had displayed our passports and tickets and were walking arm in arm along the ramp to the airplane. It was completely surreal, and I couldn’t decide whether I felt overjoyed or disappointed.
My seat was in the very first row of coach. Natalia had already worked out getting her seat assigned next to me, and we settled down together for the four-hour flight. She had gone to so much trouble in order to be with
me that I felt guilty about my mixed feelings, which had nothing to do with her personally. I loved Natalia, and really there was no one in the world I’d rather see. It was just that I’d been so happy pretending not to be pregnant. It would have been so easy to keep doing exactly that with no one along on this trip who knew. But now Natalia would want to talk about it constantly. When really, what was there to talk about? Nothing could be done about anything till we got back from Canada.
I decided to level with her. “Look,” I said, once we settled into our seats. Natalia had just turned to look at me with the most dazed and wide-eyed expression, and I knew she was about to ask how I was feeling. I would never last through a monthlong canoe trip if every time we had to portage Natalia started fretting about my so-called condition.
“I just want you to know,” I said, “I feel perfectly fine. I don’t feel weird or nauseous or anything. I just feel totally normal. And one thing I really want is for nobody else on this trip to know. I don’t care how friendly we get with anyone, this has to be a total secret. Okay?”
“Of course,” Natalia said. “But are you sure you feel all right?”
Truthfully, as the plane began to taxi down the runway and lift off into the sky, I felt a sinking, lurching sensation in my gut. But I had never been a good flier. I looked at the pocket in the seat in front of me and noted the exact location of the white tabs of my airsickness bag, sticking up from behind the airline magazines.
“I feel fine,” I said.
She rubbed her hands nervously over her thighs. I looked at the fake-silver Irish wedding band Steve had given her, shining on her left ring finger.
“So this is going to be great, right?” she said. “Paddling from one island to the next. Camping out. It’ll be like Survivor, except no one gets voted off.”
She still didn’t seem like herself. The words might have been enthusiastic, but her voice sounded strained. Maybe she was upset about the long separation from Steve, or else maybe she was scared of a month in the wilderness.
Every Little Thing in the World Page 5